Art.

Cultural Center Goes 5 For 5 This Summer

The Chicago Cultural Center has put up for the summer months five small exhibitions for five local artists, establishing a format that deserves to be repeated.

Each show is slim in aesthetic appeal, but taken all together in the spaces of the first floor Michigan Avenue galleries, they are diverse and nicely manageable in addition to being reminiscent of the way younger artists present their works at such forums as the Venice Biennale.

The result in Venice is, of course, a group show. But it doesn't always feel that way, because when artists use the space effectively there is the illusion of adjacent solo exhibitions that each present more than one or two pieces.

At the Center this is actually the case, suggesting in microcosm the kinds of work created by contemporary artists in Chicago, from painting, drawing and sculpture to that favorite of the 1990s, installations.

Moreover, because several of the pieces are small, the show accomodates them in fair number, giving first-time viewers an introduction that, in some cases, proves as thorough as a full exhibition at a commercial gallery.

This is especially true of Maurice Wilson, an African-American who has shown figurative paintings and drawings in Chicago since the late 1970s.

His new "Tar Baby" paintings are more overt in their expression of the artist's heritage, though also subtler in means, for despite some large (unsuccessful) symbolic pictures, the majority are small still lifes of acrylic and tar on burlap, conveying a lot of feeling through the rawness and cultural associations of materials.

Painter Yee Jan Bao and sculptor Frederick Holland also work small, allowing for a generous representation of apparently continuing series on, respectively, monkeys and antique instruments of warfare.

They share space effectively considering the profound differences in the tone of their pieces and, especially, the playfulness that comes from Bao's canvases even when they are biomorphically abstract or tending toward modern stripe paintings.

Some of Brian Sikes' enormous drawings of support structures in architecture were on view at a commercial space just four months ago, though he contributes an even larger piece drawn on a gallery wall that better conveys the visionary quality he is after.

The forms deployed on the immense horizontal that greets viewers upon entry into Sikes' space do not have the benefit of even the minimal color-a faint blush of sunlight-on two of the drawings, but still they command the space with some power.

Mary Brogger likewise works with her space directly, adapting for the floor an iron curtain she showed three years ago in a commercial gallery but also fitting windows with protective steel gratings and transforming the entry corridor through a deft application of blankets used by movers.

Those who did not see the lacy filigree of the curtain will be taken with it equally much in the guise of a richly patterned carpet, and it looks particularly good in relation to the threatening protection of Brogger's gratings. (At 78 E. Washington St, through Aug. 15.)